States Reluctant to Follow Nevada's Lead and Sell Advertising on Health Exchanges

Nevada's health insurance exchange plans to sell ads on its website to boost revenue and keep consumers' costs down, but their peers are reluctant to follow.

By law, the online health insurance marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) must be financially self-sustaining by 2015. Most states are planning to pay for their operation by charging a user fee to insurers that sell their plans on the marketplaces, also known as exchanges. But those costs will likely be passed onto the customer, making health coverage under the ACA a little less affordable.

That gave one state, Nevada, an idea: sell advertising space on the exchange’s website to generate some extra revenue.

The state doesn’t yet know exactly how much money banner or pop-up ads could yield for the exchange, but every advertising dollar means a lower price for the people purchasing coverage. Officials are in the process of drafting a request for proposals and hope to have ads on the exchange site by the middle of 2014. Nevada’s marketplace -- like others across the country -- launches Oct. 1, 2013.

“If we broaden our revenue base, we will have a viably funded exchange. We want to be sure that we don't just burden the insurance buyer,” says C.J. Bawden, a spokesperson for Nevada’s marketplace, the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange. “The more we can broaden our base, the more we can hopefully lower those charges and lower the price of insurance.”

For now, Nevada is the only state with definite plans to sell ads on its website. Governing surveyed 16 of the 17 state-based exchanges (Idaho was excluded because of its late start) and only three—Colorado, Hawaii and Vermont—said they were considering selling ads in the future.

As for the federal exchange that will sell insurance plans for the 30-plus states that decided not to set up their own marketplace, officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) say it won't sell ads as a revenue source -- but there's nothing stopping the state-based exchanges from doing so.

So why aren’t more of them following Nevada's footsteps?

Most likely because of the administrative and publicity headaches that might come with selling ads on a political lightning rod like the ACA’s exchange, says Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“States will want to be really careful about the ads that they allow on the exchanges. I suspect that's why many states have chosen not to allow ads to be sold,” she says. “But as long as the state is really careful, it could be a good vehicle for revenue.”

That’s an issue already weighing on the minds of Nevada officials. Bawden gives the admittedly outlandish example of one of the state’s legal brothels trying to purchase ad space on the exchange.

To avoid such a scandal, Nevada's exchange is hoping to attract advertising partners who would further its mission of extending health coverage to uninsured Americans. Dental and vision insurance plans, which could supplement the more traditional medical coverage that will be sold on the marketplace, could be obvious targets. The details will be ironed out after the request for proposals is finalized and responses are received.

True Exchange Costs Still Unknown

The relative smoothness (or bumpiness) of Nevada’s experience could inform other states’ decisions, Tolbert says, but there's another to-be-determined factor: how much it actually costs to operate an exchange. Right now, with the federal government footing the bill, it’s mostly guesswork, but estimates of exchange operating costs range from $25 million to $60 million or more, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

If the exchanges end up being more expensive than states expected or if fewer people enroll in the exchanges than anticipated, that could cause officials to return to the idea of advertisements as a revenue stream.

“If it comes down to a choice between significantly increasing the assessments and looking toward other ways to generate revenue, states could be open to trying something new,” Tolbert says.

The Year Ahead in Health Reform: Dylan Scott's educated guesses about what to expect from the Affordable Care Act in its first year of full implementation.

Exchange enrollment will be (a little) lower than expected. The almost exclusive focus on outreach in the six months or so leading to the exchange openings on Oct. 1 should tell you that even supporters of the law are worried about whether they can get enough people to sign up for coverage. When four in 10 Americans say they don't know the ACA is still law -- and those proportions rise among the low-income people the law is intended to benefit -- I think the White House might struggle to reach its goal of 7 million enrollees in the first year.

At least five more states will expand Medicaid by 2015. I'm looking to historical precedents on this one. ACA supporters will often point out that nearly half the states didn't join Medicaid when the program was created in 1965, but almost all of them had within the next few years. I think the prospect of losing another year of 100 percent federal funding for expansion will be too much for at least a handful of states to pass up. The 2014 midterm election complicates this a bit, but there are enough states that were close to expanding this year -- Florida, Ohio and Tennessee, to name a few -- that it's easy to see them finishing the job next year.

Obamacare will become a little more popular once it's fully implemented. I'm not expecting conservatives to have a sudden change of heart and embrace the law, but the ACA's approval and disapproval ratings have hovered in the low 40's since it was passed, which means that close to 20 percent of people are undecided. That's a lot of people who could be won over, and 2014 finally brings the most visible parts of the law: the exchanges and the Medicaid expansion. People will actually know other people who are getting health coverage because of Obamacare. I think that starts to turn the tide in the law's favor.